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vinces99 (2792707) writes "Forget to turn off the lights before leaving the apartment? No problem. Just raise your hand, finger-swipe the air and your lights will power down. Want to change the song playing on your music system in the other room? Move your hand to the right and flip through the songs. University of Washington computer scientists have developed gesture-recognition technology that brings this a step closer to reality. They have shown it’s possible to leverage Wi-Fi signals around us to detect specific movements without needing sensors on the human body or cameras. By using an adapted Wi-Fi router and a few wireless devices in the living room, users could control their electronics and household appliances from any room in the home with a simple gesture."Link to Original Source

WebMink writes "Is it possible that the CEO of the company that's trying to file a trademark on 'Python' was unaware of Python's importance as a programming technology? That's what he claims — despite running a hosting company that's trying to break into cloud computing, where Python is used extensively. Still, he also regards the Python Software Foundation as a hostile American company and thinks that getting attention from half the world's geeks is a DDoS. From the article: '[The CEO, Tim Poultney,] confirmed that he'd not involved any technical staff in the decisions he'd made about the Python product brand, and told me he regretted that as it would probably have helped him understand the likely reaction to his trademark challenge. ... He said he now understood how offended the global developer community are and told me there was obviously only one outcome that was now possible.'"

I guess I'll have to learn more about this virus. There was a video around here somewhere... Ah. Here it is. I'll put it on tonight and see what this is all about. It's a movie called Hackers. Hollywood wouldn't lie to me, right?

Joren writes "Bad Lip Reading is an independent producer known for anonymously parodying music and political videos by redubbing them with his humorous attempts at lip-reading, such as Everybody Poops (Black Eyed Peas) and Trick the Bridesmaid (Obama). According to an interview in Rolling Stone, he creates entirely new music from scratch consisting of his bad lip readings, and then sets them to the original video, often altering the video for humorous effect and always posting a link to the original off which it is based. Although his efforts have won the respect of parody targets Michael Bublé and Michelle Bachman, not everyone has been pleased. Two days ago, UMG succeeded in getting his parody Dirty Spaceman taken down from YouTube, and despite BLR's efforts to appeal, in his words UMG essentially said "We don't care if you think it's fair use, we want it down." And YouTube killed it.So does this meet the definition of parody as a form of fair use? And if so, what recourse if any is available for artists who are caught in this situation? Are UMG's actions a justifiable attempt to defend their rights under the law, or should this be seen as an attempt to get content they don't like removed from the Internet?"

tekgoblin writes "Starz plans to pull all of its movies and TV shows from the Netflix streaming library after talks failed. Starz which is owned by John Malone’s Liberty Media said that they have ended talks with Netflix to renew a deal that ends February 28th. Netflix stands to lose a large amount of content as Starz has licenses for first run Sony and Walt Disney movies."Link to Original Source

cybrpnk2 (579066) writes "From Tech Review's arXiv Blog: "Dimitar Ouzounov at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland and a few buddies present the data from the Great Tohoku earthquake which devastated Japan on 11 March. Their results, although preliminary, are eye-opening. They say that before the M9 earthquake, the total electron content of the ionosphere increased dramatically over the epicentre, reaching a maximum three days before the quake struck. At the same time, satellite observations showed a big increase in infrared emissions from above the epicentre, which peaked in the hours before the quake. In other words, the atmosphere was heating up.""Link to Original Source

An anonymous reader writes "In Windows 7, any time you connect to a network, Windows tells you if you have full internet access or just a local network connection. It also knows if a WiFi access point requires in-browser authentication. How? It turns out, a service automatically requests a file from a Microsoft website every time you connect to any network, and the result of this attempt tells it whether the connection is successful. This feature is useful, but some may have privacy concerns with sending their IP address to Microsoft (which the site logs, according to documentation) every single time they connect to the internet. As it turns out, not only can you disable the service, you can even tell it to check your own server instead."Link to Original Source

harryk writes "Hope I'm not the first to submit this note about the most recent Adobe Acrobat update for Android devices (IOS unaffected?). According to the new permission requirements, "Read Gmail" is required. The only benefit of the new release is reportedly so that Acrobat can open when you want to read PDF files. The only problem with that logic is that Adobe Acrobat can ALREADY do this without needing to read my mail. From the update notes: "Adobe Reader now requires permission to read Gmail and default Email client. This is to enable users to open Gmail and default Email client PDF attachments using Adobe Reader only when users select the application to view PDF files. This permission is required because of a known limitation with the Android platform."... Just tested this function and it works without the 'update'. What are you trying to do Adobe?"

An anonymous reader writes "The security loophole described in this report allows an ex or frenemy to hijack your Facebook account within few minutes. It was discovered at University of Illinois and was reported immediately to Facebook. Interestingly and very surprisingly, other websites such as allfacebook.com pulled the report off their website. It is not confirmed whether Facebook has plugged the loophole."Link to Original Source

An anonymous reader writes "Murfie.com is one of the coolest ways I have seen to sell, buy and trade music online. I am sure that, like me, you have a box full of CDs sitting in your closet that you haven't touched in years. Murfie will pay for you to send them in (they even provide a box) and then give you the ability to trade and sell your music online. The site seems very well done and dead simple to use. Already bought a few albums and traded some away. The best part is that you can download the music later. Thank god. Never have to see those CDs again, but still get to enjoy the music. They even let you download in FLAC for you audiophiles out there."Link to Original Source

dbune writes "Young people who argue with their parents over wearing the same pair of smelly jeans can now cite the work of a 20-year old University of Alberta student who wore the same jeans for 15 months straight. From the article: 'Josh Le wore the same pair of jeans to break in the raw denim, so it would wrap the contours of his body, leaving distinct wear lines. He had his textile professor test the jeans for bacteria before washing them for the first time.
The results showed high counts of five different kinds of bacteria, but nothing in the range of being considered a health hazard."

wiredmikey writes "Anonymizer, Inc. has developed Anonymizer Nevercookie, a free Firefox plugin that protects against the Evercookie, a javascript API built and made available by Samy Kamkar (same guy who brought you the Samy Worm and XSS Hacking to Determine Physical Location) who set out to prove that the more you store and the more places you store it, the harder it is for users to control a Web site's ability to uniquely identify their computer. The plugin extends Firefox's private browsing mode by preventing Evercookies from identifying and tracking users."